I'm sure this is going to be a very unpopular opinion here...but Microsoft Access 2000 was amazing for managing small databases shared on a LAN. You could build relational tables, and it managed all the keys, etc. You could build a CRUD app in less than an hour for almost any data an organization might have.
You could then scale up to ODBC or SQL databases as time went on. It was part of that golden era of tools that did lots of useful things, and could be used by those with domain knowledge, right before .NET infected Microsoft.
If you needed to interface with specialized hardware (as I did a few times), you could use VBA or Delphi to do that work, and tie it into the back-end, while providing a good UI for the person operating the hardware.
You could then scale up to ODBC or SQL databases as time went on. It was part of that golden era of tools that did lots of useful things, and could be used by those with domain knowledge, right before .NET infected Microsoft.
If you needed to interface with specialized hardware (as I did a few times), you could use VBA or Delphi to do that work, and tie it into the back-end, while providing a good UI for the person operating the hardware.